“Snacks,” Thomas said from behind Andrew. “We’re allowed to stock up, Mr. Clemens.”
Clemens gave Thomas a cool look at the omission ofprofessor. “Nice. Unzip it and show me what you bought, boys.”
Andrew froze with his eyes on the ground, and a thousand thoughts blazed in terrified circles through his brain. But Ms. Poppy swept past in her patchwork skirt. She smiled when she saw Thomas’s new sketch pad under his arm.
“Let the boys out, Chris,” she said. “Wickwood isn’t a prison. We don’t pat them down.”
Andrew stumbled off the bus before Clemens could argue with a senior teacher. Thomas catapulted after him and they bolted for the dorms.
“We’re going to get caught and expelled.” Andrew’s heartbeat roared in his ears. “Maybe the monsters won’t even be there tonight.”
Thomas gave him a dry smile, but there was something empty behind his eyes. Something hopeless.
The night was a living thing, breathing with them as they stood in the forest. Moss thickened in their lungs and they could taste autumn leaves.
Thomas held the hatchet, flashlight glancing off the red blade until it looked dipped in blood. Andrew carried a garden spike and his anxiety knotted around his throat like it meant to strangle him.
Thomas had pulled his hood up and kept his eyes on the ground to hide his dread. But Andrew could feel Thomas’s fear, the exhaustion—but also his loss.
First his art, now the woods. They used to belong to Thomas. This was the place where he roared and grew taller, where his smile could make flowers bloom and his energy could flow endless and untamed.
Monsters had eaten that out of him. The trick would be to stop them before there was nothing left of Thomas to save.
Thomas’s hand trembled around the hatchet, and he couldn’t stop twitching and snatching glances at the forest as Andrew made a half-hearted attempt to find his phone again. If he had to confess its loss to his dad and ask for a new one, he’d have to lie about what had happened. No way could he say where he’d lost it.
“It could be anything tonight,” Thomas said. “Once it was an elven queen with a moon sickle blade, and I only survived because she got bored.”
“Maybe we should set a trap,” Andrew said. “Find something for bait.”
Thomas’s smile had a hard edge. Humorless.
Andrew understood it then.Theywere the bait.
The wind picked up and scattered leaves over the path as they set off to hunt. No use waiting for the monsters. The night pressed close to Andrew’s spine, cool hands sliding up his sweater and over his ribs. It seemed fascinated with the concept of his beating pulse, and it left inky fingerprints along his collarbone. If it asked to kiss him, he thought he would say yes.
If the trees belonged to Thomas, midnight was in love with Andrew. It made him braver somehow, invisible, hiding his delicate edges and leaving behind a lean and hungry shadow. In the dark, no one could see his hollow and empty places. Instead he looked like he could have teeth.
They felt, more than saw, the monsters wake.
Things pulled out of trees. Breathing came, hot and heavy, so close but out of sight.
Andrew could smell it: rotting leaves and earth left tomolder for a thousand years. It was diseased trees and putrefied sap and that disgusting sweetness of decaying meat.
The monsters could be anything tonight—except they didn’t attack. They just watched and nipped at the boys as they passed.
“Right, so it’s not the sketchbook,” Andrew said. “But something’s different. Do you feel it?”
Thomas adjusted his grip on the hatchet. “I guess destroying the sketchbook and getting a real weapon has threatened them?”
The boys waited, but dawn drew soft pink lines in the sky before they realized nothing would come for them that night. They returned to bed exhausted, because it turned out that not fighting monsters was just as harrowing as fighting them.
The next night was the same.
And the next.
They heard snickering among the trees, or maybe it was their boots crunching leaves. They found claw marks in the bark and a half-eaten deer with its belly ripped open and splattering the roots of the Wildwood tree. Andrew remembered when his boots had sunk into bloodied mud here, but that hadn’t been real. This was real. At least, he thought so.
But nothing attacked them.
